The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  “Echoes of these utterances were heard in Parliament yesterday. Whether criticism is justified is a question which none can judge who is not technically expert and fully informed.

  “But the fact that such a debate should be carried on in the enemy’s hearing among allies in a life and death struggle implies that something is wrong with the organization of the United Nations for war. It is evidence, if not of divided, at least of undefined purpose. It limits mutual confidence, and without a clear purpose absolute confidence in the enemy’s dominion is not to be overthrown.”

  The Times declares that while Germany has isolated Russia from her friends and Japan has cut off China from Allied aid, this is no reason why the Allies should acquiesce in “fighting separate wars.” Continuing, the newspaper says:

  “There must be a common plan for all the United Nations, so unified and so completely worked out by a joint organ of supreme policy and command that each can feel unquestioningly confident that the actions of all the others are being completely coordinated toward achievement of the same ultimate goal—the immediately necessary means to bring in all latent power for effective action at the earliest possible time.

  “Recent utterances of Allied leaders have encouraged doubt whether in this fourth year of the war any such complete plan yet exists.”

  CHURCHILL PARRIES QUESTION

  This last is a doubt that is plaguing most Britons. It found expression today in a question put to Mr. Churchill, which evoked the following response:

  “I have, of course, read and considered the statement referred to, and we are quite clear that no statement by His Majesty’s Government is called for at present beyond those that have been already given on this subject.” The only government statement on this matter was that made by Mr. Churchill Sept. 8. when he noted Russia’s continued resistance. He said then that, while the Soviet Government felt that the Allied nations were not doing enough to relieve Nazi pressure, it was the determination of the United Nations to go to the aid of the Russians as soon as possible.

  Today’s statement, however, was not enough to satisfy Aneurin Bevan, one of Mr. Churchill’s severest critics. Mr. Bevan asked:

  “Does the Prime Minister realize the serious effect on war production that may follow if the feeling grows that there is any misunderstanding between the Soviet Union and ourselves? Will there not be an early opportunity of clearing the public mind in this matter?”

  PERSISTS IN REFUSAL TO REPLY

  It has been argued, with documentary proof, that production in British mines and factories went up the day of the Dieppe raid. Some advocates of a second front have undertaken to argue the converse of the proposition that workers will work harder if they are satisfied that their labor is contributing directly to the defeat of the Axis. However, Mr. Churchill drew cheers today when he declined again to add to his earlier statement.

  Oliver Stanley, former War Secretary, interposed a friendly question suggesting that whatever else the people of this country might suspect they knew their Prime Minister was “the last man in the world who needs prodding.”

  F. J. Bellenger, Laborite, then asked the Prime Minister for assurance “that there is the closest integration of staff matters between Russia and this country.”

  “I have really nothing to add, certainly not on the spur of the moment, to the carefully weighed statement I have made on this subject,” Mr. Churchill replied, “and I would strongly advise the House not to press these matters unduly at a period which is certainly significant.”

  To demands that, in view of the discussion Premier Stalin’s letter had aroused, the British Government make an early statement of its attitude on a second front, Mr. Churchill appealed to the Commons to support the position his government had taken. After that the Speaker intervened to prevent further interrogation. A majority of the members seemed to welcome that intervention.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1942

  AFRICA BATTLE ON

  British Advance Under Cover of Artillery Fire and Air Bombings

  FLIERS INCREASE BLOWS

  Germans Say Sandstorm Was Used to Hide Preparations for Allies’ Big Thrust

  By The United Press.

  CAIRO, Egypt, Oct. 31—The Imperial Eighth Army was reported driving home a major attack against General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s anchor positions near the Mediterranean coast tonight under cover of a rolling artillery barrage and sweeping air assaults in which American and British planes ranged from the desert battleground to Axis reinforcement bases on Crete.

  [A German radio report heard in London said the Eighth Army opened a powerful attack at dawn yesterday after massing reinforcements drawn from the center and southern sectors of the Alamein line under cover of a sand-storm. Heavy tanks and artillery, the report said, were pacing the attack and the progress of the fighting was not yet certain. The Germans said their dive-bombers and fighters were attacking the British during lulls in a sandstorm and claimed five Curtiss P-40’s had been shot down.]

  The Allied air attack appeared to be growing in intensity. American bombers ranged over Crete, attacking the Maleme airdrome and Canea and leaving fires that were visible thirty miles away.

  AXIS REINFORCED FROM MALEME

  The Maleme airdrome is the chief landing point for German troop-carrying Junkers-52’s and glider trains that bring reinforcements from Europe to the North African battleground.

  The American pilots reported that their bombs landed in the target area and, together with persistent submarine attacks on Axis surface transport on the Mediterranean, were believed to have complicated the Axis supply and reinforcement problem.

  The fighting along the Alamein line was reported to be a dogged, hard struggle with the Germans repeatedly launching counter-attacks despite huge losses from British artillery and machine-gun fire. Each time the Germans brought up tanks, it was reported, the armored forces were driven back, leaving the battleground strewn with wrecked and damaged machines.

  The Germans were said to show particular anxiety over night attacks by the Imperials, in which two valuable positions have been seized.

  British pressure reportedly was concentrated along the Mediterranean end of the front in an effort to straighten the Imperial right flank. However, progress was not easy, it was said, despite bombardments in which the Imperial artillery in the past seven days has fired more shells than were employed in the entire preceding three months.

  A large convoy of military trucks traveling along a road near Alamein, Egypt.

  In the air attacks over the battle-field American planes attacked the Axis landing ground at El Daba, where they smashed German planes on the ground. Other attacks were directed at El Adem, where at least four Junkers-52 troop transports were smashed; at Bagush, where two or more fighters were wrecked; at Fuka, where more planes were hit, and at Sidi Abd El-Rahman, where Axis guns were hit.

  The Imperial communiqué credited the Allied air force with nine victories in the air, with a loss of three machines. The bag included two 109’s, a Junkers-52, a dive-bomber and several Italian Macchi-202’s.

  NOVEMBER 3, 1942

  OFFICER DEPICTS SINKING OF WASP

  Tells Here How Carrier’s Fate Was Decided 30 Seconds after First Torpedo Hit

  MANY FIRES SET ON SHIP

  Lieutenant A. J. Tucker Says Marines Piled Up 22,000 Tons Of Japanese Scrap

  The marines at Tulagi Harbor and Henderson Field have piled up 22,000 tons of Japanese scrap, it was estimated here yesterday by Lieutenant A. J. Tucker, U.S.N.R., who was in command of underwater stabilization aboard the aircraft carrier Wasp when she was sunk in the battle for the Solomon Islands.

  Lieutenant Tucker described the loss of the Wasp at a meeting of 200 salesmen representing steel warehouses in the New York area who were opening a campaign to search for scrap metal in 5,000 industrial plants as part of a national movement of the American Steel Warehouse Association to collect 2,000,000 tons of scrap by Dec. 31. The meeting was held at the Hotel New Yor
ker.

  “I don’t know how long it takes to collect 22,000 tons of scrap metal,” said Lieutenant Tucker. “I do know how long it takes to assemble that amount of steel into a big fighting ship, with an air group unexcelled, an internal organization which has been cohered by the rigors of thousands of miles of steaming, months of gunnery practice, hundreds of drills of all sorts, and the whole possessing a degree of keenness available only to those who have sailed through a large part of the ocean war zones. And, to my sorrow, I know how long it takes to reduce that living organism to junk.

  FIGHT DECIDED IN THIRTY SECONDS

  “Thirty seconds after the first torpedo struck we were licked. We fought a rear-guard action for over an hour and a half, but no power on earth could have stemmed the tide of fire, flame, concussion, smoke and flying fragments that resulted from the number of hits, the type of explosion, the internal fires, the tons of ready ammunition at the guns and on the planes, and the devastation of a gasoline system on the rampage.

  “The under-water damage was not severe and we were able to control the sickening list that resulted from the opening up of the hull, so that we were not faced with the immediate foundering of the ship. Also, the engineering plant was in good enough shape to answer almost any demand for speed or steam. So far as the down-below personnel were concerned, we were not faced with immediate destruction.

  “This, however, was not the determining factor. I could not possibly do justice to the hideous devastation that existed in the hangar when I went over the side amidships. Every plane forward of that point was attired with flaming pools of gasoline, exploding bombs, ammunition in the machine-gun belts pattering in a steady chatter—all making the sound effects for a Disney color scheme and the whole serving as the unchallengeable reason for abandoning ship.

  TELLS OF JAPANESE TOUGHNESS

  “How did it happen that the heathen had more guts than brains to throw himself into the face of sure destruction to pick off the ripe plum in the middle of the force? It was because we are up against the toughest proposition that the world has seen, despite the observations before the war that he was a mimic, he was too myopic to fly, he didn’t have financial stamina for a sustained war, and that inbreeding and syphilis had made him unfit for any class of combat work.

  “We have had almost eleven months of war. I hope by now we have dispelled this illusion. He has displayed resourcefulness and initiative and military intelligence and a full understanding of the offensive spirit. He wages no war of limited liability and recognizes the expendability of both men and machines in the balance of the goal to be attained. His every soldier and sailor has an awe-inspiring attitude of courage that makes all men pause. And very evidently he doesn’t have any controversial Russian geniuses to upset his employment of every weapon and force at his disposal in order to attain his ends.

  PAYS TRIBUTE TO MARINES

  “If I wasn’t sure of all these things before, I am now. And if the Marines in the Solomons weren’t sure of it, they are now. And it is a tribute to them that they were either prepared to meet him on equal terms or else they learned damn fast; at any rate, they still hold this little theatre of war in spite of all his efforts and have displayed courage and resourcefulness enough to make Henderson Field and Tulagi Harbor a scrap pile of approximately 22,000 tons. This is no satisfaction to me; but it is comforting to think about.”

  The American Industries Salvage Committee announced that the honor of naming a Liberty ship, as a reward, for their collections of scrap metal in a nation-wide competition, had been won by school children of Oklahoma. They will name the ship the Will Rogers, and the widow of the cowboy humorist has been invited to accompany the youngsters to the launching of the 10,000-ton ship in an Eastern shipyard this month.

  The winners are H. J. Terry, 10 years old, Oscar School in Jefferson County, whose twenty-three pupils gathered an average of 5,500 pounds, either Dorothy Lipsey, 10, or Margaret May Snell, 8, Gyp Valley School, Harper County, after a deadlock in the race for second place is broken, and Bobby Lee Walker, 10, Walco School, near Tulsa.

  NOVEMBER 4, 1942

  War Election History Is Repeated; Times Sq., as in 1918, Is Subdued

  By MEYER BERGER

  History repeated itself in Times Square last night. Sober soldiers, sailors and civilians eddied northward, southward and flowed across the intersections in the enshadowed canyon under a sharpening November wind just as they had on election night in 1918, when the world was at war.

  Reporters who were out that night, twenty-four years ago, came back to the office to write: “The city took the election news soberly last night. It was a new experience for the city to have its Great White Way turned into darkness and gloom. There was an utter absence of jollification and scarcity of noise.”

  Last night Times Square wore its melancholy cloak of darkness to keep down skyglow that might betray Allied ships to German submarines off the coast. Twenty-four years ago last night the Square was darkened for coal conservation. No street signs burned and shop and restaurant windows wore the same gloomy habit as the shops wore last night.

  After the early crowds vanished into the theatres and motion picture houses, the Square seemed almost desolate. Open pavement glistened in the feeble light. No traffic moved on it to break wide sweeps of open space. Mounted men lined at the curbs were silhouetted against the faint marquee glow with no surging thousands to handle. The foot patrol walked the windy beat with hands clasped behind their backs. Times Square looked almost like a semi-rural main street.

  There were two major differences between this morning’s headlines and the headlines of the election night of the first World War. On Nov. 6, 1918, Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic candidate, was ahead of Charles Whitman, the Republican candidate. Sharing the banner space at the top of the morning newspapers was the news in large black type: “Allies Fix Terms That Germany Must Take.”

  Below this another headline told of the Austrian Army’s surrender to the Italian forces. “End of War in Sight,” the newspapers said and so it was. Five days later blacker headlines proclaimed “Armistice Signed, End of War! Berlin Seized by Revolutionists; New Chancellor Begs for Order.”

  Last night, with the war’s end apparently nowhere in sight, the Square carried comparatively light pedestrian and motor traffic. Service men and civilians took up most of the sidewalk space, but there were frequent empty patches in every block. No returns were flashed on The Times’s bulletin board, as in peaceful years, because of the dimout. No giant spectacular signs glowed in the Square. There seemed to be more light in the clear sky than in the streets.

  LONGS FOR ‘OLD DAYS’

  The police detail was the smallest in more than a score of years. Only 300 men patrolled the Square, 150 on foot, the rest on horses, motor-cycles or in squad cars. Looking northward from the police information booth at Forty-third Street, down the lanes of crisply glowing red and green traffic lights, one policeman wistfully recalled when elections WERE elections.

  “I’ve seen election nights in this Square,” he mused aloud, “when the foot detail alone came to 600–700 and when the whole detail came to around 1,500. There aren’t enough cops out here tonight to handle the fag end of a lively weddin’.”

  With no cheering, shoving thousands clustered around the projection booth damming up hundreds of thousands behind them, as in other years, last night’s tides flowed smoothly. The general pace was quick because of the increasing wind. There seemed to be no interest in the election outcome, certainly no talk about it. Even at the bars the talk was mostly of war in the Pacific and in Egypt and Russia, not of Dewey and Bennett.

  The temperature by The Times Tower thermometer, oddly enough, was exactly as it was that election night twenty-four years ago. It stayed in the lower forties. The air was sharp enough to keep the police mounts curveting, restlessly pawing the pavement. These hoof clashes carried far in the comparative quiet. What with gasoline rationing and other restrictions, motor traffic was t
hinned to a trickle.

  There was no sound but the subdued murmur of conversation from the eddying throngs. Stern priority had stripped the Square of the peacetime venders of tin horns and Bronx blubber blowers. Mood, of course, had something to do with the quiet.

  In the lower Square, though, one bell tinkled and jangled in a tired sort of way. Pushing through the crowd toward this sound you discovered it wasn’t an election reveller stubbornly clinging to tradition in the face of war. It was a woman in a fur coat, haloed by the Paramount Theatre lobby lights, seated at a War Bonds sales booth.

  If last night’s Times Square crowd was not the smallest in city history, it made a bid for the distinction.

  THEATRE CROWD MELTS QUICKLY

  The theatre break around 11 o’clock brought a brief gush of traffic, a sudden surge of pedestrians, but the crowds moved silently toward subways and buses. In the weak light under the Paramount marquee a newsdealer cried the election results, “Dewey Wins.” The home-bound passed the stand unheeding. The crowds drained off quickly, whipped by the cold wind.

  The City Hospital intern, his coat blowing as he stood beside the ambulance on call at the police booth, watched the departing thousands. “What an election,” he said. “Not a turned ankle, not even a single belly ache.” He lapsed into gloomy silence. Pretty soon the shrill traffic whistles died away. The Square was a huddle of scattered soft lights. The wind swept down deserted side streets. The mounted men swung into the saddle, clattered westward in Forty-third Street in the darkness.

  NOVEMBER 6, 1942

  London Elated by Triumph; Axis Tasting Punishment